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Bug 12

Seeing someone speak that you admire is always a pleasure, and we were lucky enough to be invited down to the British Film Institute last night to do just that.

BUG is a night of music videos and YouTube nuggets (two of my favourite things) and is hosted by all-time top 10 funny man Adam Buxton of Adam & Joe fame.

Basically the audience sit in comfy seats in a beautful venue for an hour and a half, while Adam plays great music videos and chats about things he’s seen on YouTube, there’s no magic formula, it just works fantastically.

We were played many wonderful pieces of film, including this one from Spike Jonze and Ty Evans for Unkle, but this was my favourite one. If you ever get the chance to go to one of these bi-monthly events I cannot reccommend them highly enough.

And so the crème de la crème was announced, with five of D&AD’s highest honour – the Black Pencil – awarded this year. From radio advertising to branding it’s a diverse selection that’s sure to get people talking. It’s great to see some of our favourite projects from the last year recognised, and some we weren’t familiar with (the brilliant radio station for dogs, for instance) being celebrated. Without further ado, here they are!Made Thought’s comprehensive rebrand of paper manufacturers G. F. Smith aimed to “better reflect the legacy, stature and future ambitions of the company,” using a new Humanist Sans typeface designed to reflect both machine printing and calligraphy. As well as creating the new identity, Made Thought has also revamped G. F. Smith’s websites.

D&AD has awarded White Pencils in a category of their own since 2013, and these recognise design and advertising projects that “demonstrate that marketing and marketing communications can be a force for good,” in the words of D&AD CEO Tim Lindsay. Four projects have been awarded the philanthropic pencils this year, two for brand and two for not-for-profit advertising and marketing communications. Here are the projects recognised this year… Lowe China used very powerful images of road traffic accident victims holding signs in the Human Traffic Sign campaign, which takes a straightforward idea and executes it brilliantly. Created as part of car client Buick’s wider road safety campaign, Human Traffic addresses the fact that one person dies every ten minutes in China – a terrifying statistic indeed.www.lowechina.com the infuriatingly catchy LEGO Movie song Everything is Awesome for good, Don’t Panic London’s video (which went viral almost instantly) showed a beautiful LEGO Arctic scene being destroyed by oil. The campaign was a protest against LEGO’s alignment with Shell, the upshot was that in July last year the toy manufacturer announced it wouldn’t be renewing its contract with the oil giant – a true success story.

The category winners for this year’s Designs of the Year have been announced, including a nod to one of our favourite projects, Marcel’s Inglorious Fruits & Vegetables campaign, which scooped the graphics category nomination. The campaign was nominated by our very own Alex Bec, and was created to champion the beauty within misshapen fruits and vegetables, which are sold at Intermarché for 30% cheaper than their more traditional-looking counterparts. The overall Design of the Year from the six category winners will be announced June, and all are on display at the exhibition alongside the other nominations (read our thoughts on it here) until 31 March 2016.This crowd-funded project develops ways to efficiently remove plastic pollution from aquatic ecosystems on a large scale.www.theoceancleanup.com university building in Santiago was designed to create “the right environment for knowledge-creation.”www.elementalchile.cl car that drives itself! No wheels, no pedals, just a button.www.googleblog.blogspot.co.uk little chips were developed by Harvard University students and use living human cells that mimic the complex tissue structures and functions of entire organs, aiming to help advance the creation of personalised medicines and aid drug discovery with lower development costs.www.wyss.harvard.edu Central St Martins graduate’s designs were chosen for their demonstration of technical skills and aesthetics, showing combinations of colour, cut and materials “with vision and confidence,” according to the Design Museum.www.thomastait.com

It’s Nice That founder and creative director Will Hudson was part of the D&AD Black Pencil jury this year. Here he is on judging one of the industry’s main awards, and why it helped change his mind about creative competitions…

People in the graphic arts world have got an infernal problem with Pick Me Up. It’s the Taylor Swift of illustration events: everyone claims they’re not into it but when it comes on the radio they know all the words and are happily singing along. My opinion on it has undulated for years, but going to the private view last night made me realise that all this time I doubted it and listened sceptically to the rumours surrounding it, I was totally wrong.